Originally Posted by
WonderDude
I guess I'm trying to find out if it makes more sense to either buy direct from Air Tahiti, or through a travel site. I understand the process direct is cumbersome -- faxing stuff and sketchy confirmation. The 3rd party sites have markups and fees. And then I wonder if the currency conversion makes any difference either way (a glitch in my favor would be sweet, but extremely lucky, of course).
Personally I'd pay to have someone else handle it for me and be done with it.
However, it's always been cheaper to make the purchase in PPT. Risk is of a given flight being sold-out but my guess is that's remote. When are you traveling?
My other tip is not to prepay any excess baggage charges. When I left PPT they offered a discount on excess baggage if I prepaid the charge for the BOB-PPT return. I did. Had I not, I likely wouldn't have been dinged for those at all in BOB.
Also, the TN award flight I booked got rescheduled. Instead of arriving at 6 am-ish, it now arrives at 4:30 am. Any suggestions on how what time would be ideal to schedule the inter-island flight (to go through immigration, customs and bag claim and stuff)?
Immigration likely only an issue if you're last off the plane, fortunately for me I was flying F and off quickly, through immigration quickly. And baggage didn't take long.
Still, I probably wouldn't book the 6-ish am flight that operates some days, I'd probably grab the flight that leaves between 7:15am - 7:45am.
However and ultimately worst case whether you prepay your tickets or buy on site, make a short connection or not, is you take a flight later in the day. Your starting off at the beginning of the day, not grabbing the last flight of the day, so it shouldn't be too challenging.
But again for me I'd still probably not take anything leaving before 7 in case of delay (even though Minimum Connection Time int'l -> domestic is 90 minutes) and I'd probably buy from an agent recognizing that I was paying more.